Very cool. Thanks for the explanation. You can hear this (adjacent groove pre-echo, I believe) on LZII's Heartbreaker & Whole Lotta Love.
This is more likely to occur when a quiet or silent passage (narrow, straight groove) occurs adjacent to a loud passage (wide, possibly gyrating groove). That is why during mastering of lacquers, to avoid pre-echo at the beginning of all tracks, the engineer presses a console button (if available and the cutting lathe allows for it) for a couple of seconds, which adds extra space between grooves, before simultaneously pressing another button once, which creates the visible space between tracks. That first button is also used at the very beginning of a side to add space between grooves, so there is no pre-echo leading off the side. Also, the mastering engineer will have made notes if a quiet passage is followed by a loud passage in the middle of a track, so that extra groove space is added there as well.
It will still happen no matter how you store the tape. However, if you store tails out, the pre echo will occur after rather than before the offending incident. The thought is that it will be harder to hear the pre echo if there is music present due to masking. Of course if it happens before the song starts it will be obvious. Not only that, but it happens all throughout the song. Though it may not be easily heard, it's still there and it can blur things a tad. Yes, changing the print through from before to after the incident is a good reason to store tapes tails out, but it's not the only reason. I believe the main reason for storing tapes tails out is that the tape will pack much better on the reel if it's run off at play speed instead of fast wind speeds. This means that you have to rewind your tape before playing it, but when you're done playing it you just tape the tape end to the flange with a bit of red tape and you're done. When you store tapes heads out, you rewind it first and then use blue tape.
Nope, "Whole Lotta Love" has been discussed endlessly here. That was a deliberate effect intended by the group and the producer, the scratch vocal coming through: http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/led-zepplin-whole-lotta-love-pre-echo.100580/
So what is the cause of the echo on Bowie's "It's No Game Pt 1"(track 1) from Scary Monsters? It is at the tail end when he screams Shut up!! It has been left on the cd version and I thought it would have been removed in the "re-mastering" process.
I was listening for the first time to the Quality Record Pressings version of Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits the other night, and on side one there is prominent pre-echo throughout. Side two, not so much. As for LZ II, while I have no doubt that the vocal section pre-echo simulation was done entirely on purpose, on my first vinyl copy from back in the day you can faintly-but-clearly hear the first four notes of Page's intro riff, about two seconds total, before the full-volume riff crashes into life. I'm guessing that is authentic vinyl pre-echo...
Not in my opinion. Tapes are generally stored tails out which would results in a post echo. It more a factor of groove bleed where the adjacent groove on the cut encroaches. Btw, on the LZII the tape was turned over to create that effect. If you do that the normal echo, delay and reverb will be before the sound instead of after it.
What I found interesting is, since this occurs only when a loud "Groove" is next to another groove, we only hear it when there is silence on the neighboring groove, but in reality, it is occurring all the time, but merely masked when there is music in the adjacent groove. So essentially most loud parts on a record, have a pre-echo happening, that is buried 1.8 seconds (( or so depending on what part of the record obviously )) and It happens usually I'm gonna guess, as long as the neighboring groove is very close, which would be during an entire song. I wonder how much of this we "hear" subconsciously?
Absolutely. This is not something that just occurs at the beginning of the song. It's just easier to notice there. And tape print through, which is only heard after the original sound is there throughout the whole song as well. This tends to blur things a bit obviously. A way to lessen it is to record at lower levels, but that bring other issues into play. There is no doubt that analog recording via tape is a compromise in many ways. Setting up a tape recorder, one is aware of these compromises and must determine what their priorities are. As to your last statement, yes we hear this all the time, but that is also true with lots of things. I hear hiss all the time, even though it's masked. I hear hum all the time even though it's masked. The distinction is that those things are pretty constant so they're easier to hear. Print through or pre echo is always changing so it's not so easy to notice.
So can this vary depending on pressing i.e. if pressed in a different country with a different master tape or would this fault occur at the 1st mastering stage meaning all will be the same?
I once read that on certain versions of The Dark Side of The Moon at the very end you can hear The Beatles-Ticket to Ride at very low level as if it was a re used tape and still had faint original material on it?
Pre-echo (not to be confused with reverse echo) is a digital audio compression artifact where a sound is heard before it occurs (hence the name). It is most noticeable in impulsive sounds from percussion instruments such as castanets or cymbals. It occurs in transform-based audio compression algorithms – typically based on the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) – such as MP3, MPEG-4 AAC, and Vorbis, and is due to quantization noise being spread over the entire transform-window of the codec. (thank you Wikipedia)
I think he means if you hear pre-echo in a digital recording it was by design. edit^^^^ WELL..that will teach me to guess while the real guy is typing!!!!
I've always wondered about storing 'tails out' to change the ordering of print through. Isn't the oxide with the offending nanowebers of flux the same distance away from the oxide that is wound inside (closer to the hub) as it is to that wound outside (nearer the tail)? Like, if you've got silence - BANG! - silence, won't you hear print through before and after?
This phenomena is apparent on Magical Mystery Tour. I have a US Capitol Green label and it show up on most of the songs there. It does not sound like an echo of the intro on MMT and Hello Goodbye. On the latter, the song starts with vocals, but the "echo" is music, not vocals.
A classic example of pre-echo distortion on an entire side is Side 1 of Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star. Todd just packed too much sound onto one side of a vinyl LP, and made it really loud, too.
What about guide vocals? I was reading about the recording of "Exile on Main St." and many a track has a barely discernible guide vocal in the background. Almost like a ghost vocal.
Before a song starts, sometimes, I hear the beginning 1-2 secs of a song very faintly and *then* I hear the song starts. Is this normal? Listening to Abraxas and it happened. Was listening to a Mighty Sam McClain album earlier and same thing occurred. Completely harmless I'm sure but just wondering what's going on. Also possible it's on the master tape as well for some reason.
If it's 1.8 seconds early on a 33-1/3rd RPM LP, it's Adjacent Groove Pre-Echo. What Causes the Pre-Song On A LP? » If it's some other duration, it could be print-through on the tape from which the LP was sourced, but pre-echo is more likely (in my experience).
